Tattoo Artists Make It Up as They Go Along
Psst, you at the makeup counter. Drop the powder puff and put your handsup. Over here at the mirror.
Lord knows it won’t do at the cocktail party to admit wanting anything but peace on earth, a plug in that ozone hole and au naturel good looks. But for years your secret prayer goes as follows:
Dear Cosmetic Goddess, please graduate from waterproof to permanent makeup so I can wake up looking like I do after 20 minutes with an eye pencil .
Well, if you’ve got the time and the stomach for needles, there are several hundred tattoo artists in Southern California ready to give you what might be called forever makeup.
But if you were conjuring up seedy biker dens with Harleys, hashish and halters--try again. Your neighborhood hair and nail salon, if not a dermatologist’s office, may perform the magic.
An estimated 20 million Americans sport tattoos of the more traditional variety--butterflies and Medusas and weeping hearts--and many of them are the same working mothers, college students and 50-something men who have lids lined and eyebrows feathered in.
Last weekend the National Cosmetic Tattooing Assn. met at an Irvine hotel for its second annual gathering to discuss public education, professional standards and tips for better techniques.
Topics ranged from how to apply the perfect eyebrows and lips to networking, ruby laser tattoo removal and how to avoid horror stories that leave your client looking like Elvira on a bad mascara day.
For lack of any government regulation, the 3-year-old Laguna Beach-based NCTA has adopted health and safety standards it recommends to its 400 worldwide members, guidelines that resemble those used by other people who work with needles.
There is a code of ethics and an earthy camaraderie among the 200 conventioneers, some of them traveling from as far as South Africa.
They spent Saturday through Monday listening to local dermatologists, a health department official and motivational speakers. Many sported elaborate breast and back tattoos as well as those everlasting cosmetics.
Lest you think this is a women’s thing, remember vanity does not discriminate. NCTA President Patty Pavlik says men represent 20% of cosmetic tattoo customers. They typically have their eyebrows or skin pigment evened out.
“Most people who get this work done aren’t in the least bit interested in tattoos because there’s still a stigma attached,” Pavlik said. “But when it comes to something they think will make them look better, they don’t have any trouble digesting the idea of tattooing.”
Pavlik is a tanned and sunny-faced veteran of the tattoo parlor, her chest and back adorned with them. She chain-smokes and talks like Madge of the “Palmolive-your-soaking-in-it” TV commercials. And she is almost single-handedly the queen of the convention, sought in hallways by other artists and the employer of four technicians in her Laguna Beach tattoo parlor.
Although some of the work of cosmetic tattooers is reconstructive--nipples for mastectomy patients and blending skin tone for burn survivors--the NCTA estimates that most of its clients simply want to improve their appearance.
Eyebrows and eyeliner are still the most popular, Pavlik said, but at least one person a week will want blusher permanently tattooed on. “Hey,” Pavlik added, “I’ll take their money.”
Business is so good at some salons, such as her Permanent Eyes in Laguna Beach, that some practitioners don’t even need to advertise, Pavlik said, adding: “You do one woman nicely, and she goes to her country club, and there you go !”
Tattoos are created by injecting colored pigment into the skin via multiple needle punctures. This is no different when it comes to permanent makeup, except that the eye area is one of the most fragile and “least yielding” areas to work on, Tibbs said.
Although long typecast as the property of drunken sailors, Hells Angels and Cher, the number of career women with indelible body art is substantial.
In an article for Imaging, the Journal for Nursing Scholarship, University of Texas professor Myrna L. Armstrong writes that now nearly half of all tattoos are done on women. Workers in the health profession--from nurses to dentists to social workers--boasted the highest number of tattooed women, followed by those in accounting and retail sales. And those women were not questioned about tattooed makeup.
But it is not a new concept. The first traces of tattoos were identified on “the mummified skin of the Egyptian priestess of Hathor, circa 2000 BC,” a period when tattoos were valued as a sign of nobility, bravery and beauty, Armstrong writes.
Average prices begin at $375 for eyebrows and about the same for eyeliner, but cost varies depending on the individual’s skin, said Claudine Wright, a Sacramento salon owner who also teaches tattooing techniques at a Huntington Beach hair and nail shop. “We basically charge $150 to $200 an hour.”
Most of her customers “I would say are between (age) 20 and 60,” said Wright, a native of France. “But I’ve had older women, (such as) an 83-year-old with Parkinson’s disease, who could no longer put on her own makeup in the morning.”
The lack of standards concerns her because, legally, “my janitor could do this.” But she and other practitioners say they don masks and gloves and strive for an almost medical atmosphere.
“It is easier to teach cosmetologists sterilization than to teach nurses artistry,” Wright said, so she has fewer nurses who train with her than beauticians.
Although plastic surgeons make so much more for their permanent work, they have little interest in the makeup end of tattooing, she said.
But leading plastic surgeons, such as Dr. Bruce Achauer, also director of the UC Irvine Burn Center, say they do perform tattooing for patients with scarring or breast reconstruction needs.
“I use it fairly regularly in my office for nipple reconstruction,” Achauer said, but he noted that he draws the line at tattooing to replace makeup.
“I don’t do it,” he said. “It’s just not my thing.”
Lake Forest dermatologist Karen G. Benik, on staff at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute, said she does far more removal of traditional ornamental tattooing than the cosmetic variety. She spoke during the convention’s second day, explaining how a Q-switch ruby laser works to remove tattoos.
Contrary to your worst nightmare, all tattoos are not permanent--good news if you’re romantic about them and fickle at heart. Depending on the color, they can be faded if not removed. The process is relatively painless, a feeling Benik likened to “a rubber band snapping against the skin.”
In a series of slides, Benik showed how tattooed letters on knuckles and Playboy bunnies on biceps could be all but vanquished with minimal scarring and repeated laser treatments.
Most of the 135 tattoo artists at the conference seemed surprised to learn this seemingly crucial bit of data: The laser, with its “millions of watts of high-energy light,” cannot remove flesh-colored tattoo colors. So the public beware: Botched jobs should be lasered before any attempt to repair the damage by covering or blending with pigment shades.
The keynote speaker shared that her eyebrows had been tattooed on, that she had networked her way into a cable television show that is “the Wayne’s World of cooking” and that she had met her husband at a Bid-for-Bachelors charity.
The next day, the national association’s vice president, Denise Tibbs, a smoker, said technicians in her salon prefer working from behind the client, as dentists would. “It makes them less claustrophobic and me? I don’t feel like I’m spewing them with cigarette mouth either.”
Working with photographs sent to headquarters by the organization’s 400 members worldwide, Tibbs and Pavlik presented horror stories that might dissuade the most ardent fan of makeup tattoos: One woman with eyeliner like Cleopatra’s, another with clownish black-lined lips, another with blotchy, rouge-like cheeks. Still another woman looked like she had boxed Mike Tyson with her eyelids.
If people responsible for these boo-boos were present, they didn’t admit it, although Pavlik prepped the audience by saying, “If any of you are embarrassed, don’t be . . . no one intended these conditions.”
Pavlik and Tibbs instructed permanent makeup artists to work slowly, take pictures and “remember,” Pavlik said, “everything looks good when you first do it, but time will tell if you’re using the right technique.”
For eyebrows, Pavlik said at one point, “it’s either round or square. But whatever it is, do it the same on both sides.”
Seems pretty basic, but you didn’t see the “Don’t” slides.
“This is one of my favorites,” Pavlik said as all in the hotel ballroom gasped at the slide screen together.
“The hair’s growin’ the wrong way. You’d think any kindergartner would know which way the hair on an eyebrow grows. Ladies,” she added, cracking an accidental throwaway line, “if there’s hair growin’, you gotta know which way to stroke it.”
But after seeing slides of a woman who has permanent blue eye shadow, bruises around the bridge of her nose and botched lip liner, one woman in the audience asked, “Do you think laser could fix that?”
No, it turns out, because the runaway colors were not tattooed; rather the colors spread when a patient swelled up before the needle process was completed.
As a group, those applying permanent cosmetics are concerned that a lack of state or local regulation and guidelines leaves potential clients vulnerable to lasting unattractive applications, not to mention health threats from unsanitary work conditions.
“There are only four (licensing) inspectors for the entire state of California” to police 300,000 cosmetologists, said Tim Reddick, a staff member of Dermascope, a Texas-based national skin care industry magazine. “So they can’t even cover” the hair and nail salons that are licensed, he said.
He and other conference speakers said individual operators and groups such as the National Cosmetic Tattooing Assn. need to try self-policing before one charlatan tattoos the whole industry.
“They’re out there,” Reddick said. “We’re only going to see so much negative” news about permanent makeup before the practice begins to be stigmatized.
In past times, if someone got hepatitis from (standard) tattoos, Reddick said, it drew little attention or lawsuits because permanently ornamenting the body was perceived as a fetish of “drunks and dopers anyway.”
In fact, Pavlik’s roots are in the old-style tattoos, and she still prefers them “for the sheer artistry.” But about five years ago, she said, “I had so many of these gals from Laguna and Newport Beach coming in saying, ‘Can you put my brows on permanent because I’m athletic and don’t want to sweat ‘em off?’ ” The newer clientele is also much more “mature,” she said.
There are about 100 people in Orange County alone, more than in Los Angeles, applying permanent cosmetics via tattooing, she said. And many of them are electrologists who may or may not know what they are doing. Hence, public education.
“If states don’t get any funding to start another (licensing) board, somebody’s going to do some senator’s wife and give her backward eyebrows,” Pavlik said, pausing to flick her Bic, “and the next thing you know, this whole business gets shut down.”
Tattooing Tips
For those considering tattooing their make-up on, some shopping tips from the National Cosmetic Tattooing Assn.: * Visit the salon in person and talk with the practitioner at length about what you both expect.
* Know that despite the Centers for Disease Control recommending licensing there is no state certification of tattoo artists, but you can check the local courthouse for malpractice lawsuits and the state cosmetology board for complaints if the operator works in a salon.
* Personal referrals are always best, so ask for references to call, and/or meet.
* Ask to see pictures of past clients.
* Don’t assume that if you don’t like the tattoo it can necessarily be removed by laser. Some colors bode better than others, and some, like flesh colors, cannot be removed at all.
* Ask for the tattooers’ time in business and extent of their training. “A two-day seminar is really not enough,” says NCTA president Patty Pavlik.
